08/05/2018 architects without architecture – mammoth // building nothing out of something

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architects without architecture

As a coda to our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, mammoth spoke with Kazys
Varnelis, editor of that book, about how the infrastructural city and “network culture” are related,
what the contents of an imaginary new chapter for The Infrastructural City might be, and the future
of architecture in the wake of global economic crisis.

mammoth: For readers who are not familiar with the larger body of your work, we thought we
might begin by situating The Infrastructural City within that broader context. Besides editing The
Infrastructural City, you’ve also edited two other books (Networked Publics and The Phillip
Johnson Tapes), co-authored Blue Mondays with AUDC co-founder Robert Sumrell, and are
writing another book, Life after Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture. Our understanding
is that you are trained and typically describe yourself as an architectural historian, not an architect,
though of course you have taught architecture at schools on both American coasts, as well as
overseas. How do the “networked ecologies” that The Infrastructural City describes relate to this
larger body of work — particularly your investigations of “network culture” and your training as a
historian?

Varnelis: I did receive my primary training as a historian of architecture. Now that training took
place within Cornell’s architecture department , as opposed to, say an art history program and I
took studio—the sort of ultra-disciplinary, purely formal “Cornell and Cooper” studio that is virtually
extinct these days—and worked in an office for a time. But it’s an important distinction to draw.
More than virtually any other field, architects generally insist that only individuals trained (or even
licensed) as architects are qualified to speak about it. This is endemic to the discipline and
detrimental to it. Manfredo Tafuri would say that it forces every argument to be operative; another
term for this would be instrumental. If a text doesn’t end with an uplifting little section on how
architects can use it in their work, it’s not only damaged, its potentially damaging. That’s a common
perception and it is a bad thing for criticism since it reduces it to a subservient role; it’s a bad thing
for architects since it suggests that they couldn’t possibly be intelligent enough to think for
themselves; finally, it’s a bad thing for architecture since it prevents its deepest assumptions from
being called into question.

Some people have expressed confusion about what we were out to do since they wanted it to be a
ringing endorsement of a direction. They wanted to see OMA-designed windmills and so on. That
would have been a very different project and a very predictable one as well. But that was a
misunderstanding. Our intent was to produce a book that would redefine how we understand cities,
infrastructure, and Los Angeles. I wanted the book to be relevant decades later, the way that
Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies was (although by now, I’m afraid, it’s long
since worn out its utility). Superficial readings that aim for endorsements of design decisions won’t
work. One has to dig deeper to understand what our point is. Older forms of infrastructure are
history: we say that on the back cover. We’re in a different condition in this country: you can tilt at
designer windmills all you want, but unless things change radically at a sociopolitical level, they
aren’t going to get built. Our current administration is more interested in supporting the ethereal
structures of financialization than any sort of building. Let’s get that clear. Republicans will do even
worse, unless perhaps, you are a fan of military technology. Either way, the cards are stacked
against us. Under the boom, things looked mildly better in Europe, but the EU is unlikely to leave
the recession behind anytime soon. The Infrastructural City might be a good guide to the near
future of architecture there as well, even if we didn’t anticipate it would be. And please, let’s not
chase the dream to China: demographics are stacked against the Chinese. A decade of growth
and they’ll in the same situation as we are, only without any kind of social safety net.

As far as how this book fits into my current work, I have always been much more interested in big
picture investigations—the scale of the Annales school or of thinkers like McLuhan, Jameson, and
Baudrillard—than in microhistories. Even my dissertation was an affront to accepted notions of
what a Ph.D. in the history of architecture should be: I set out to investigate how architecture
turned to a spectacularized design methodology in the postwar era (most notably that very “Cornell
and Cooper” education that I was taught) and how that synced up with a general aestheticization of
politics in the field. When I was doing this kind of work everyone else was focusing on the small
scale, on miniaturesque accounts of noble architects toiling somewhere in obscurity.

With regard to the Johnson Tapes, he was a key player in this moment and I’m still fascinated by
the postwar era. Modernism had lost its ideological impetus but continued on in its own way,
zombie-like, unable to cope with the consequences of an increasingly complex, technological
society. When Joan Ockman approached me about editing the Johnson Tapes for the Buell Center,

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of course I was glad to do it. Columbia’s been great to me and this was an opportunity to do
something very direct for the school while also reviving my work on Johnson and late modernism. I
think that a critical book on Johnson is necessary: Schulze’s bio is hardly that. And the field of late
modernism is still wide open: I’ll be working on Kevin Roche later this year and that will give me the
opportunity to revisit that work as well.

For the last decade, I’ve been interested in how cities, society, and culture are transforming at this
very moment. It’s not just a matter of how network technology drives forms of inhabitation, it’s how
society is changing, partly in response to new technologies but also actively shaping those
technologies in specific ways. With Robert Sumrell, I began exploring these questions both through
conceptual design and through theory. AUDC continues to go strong and you’ll see work from us
from time to time.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with the Networked Publics team during a year-
long residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC and, after I came to Columbia,
we shaped that material into a book for Doug Sery at MIT Press. We’ve continued asking the
question of how the public is changing throughout the spring of this year and are collaborating with
Domus and with Joseph Grima on new projects related to the topic throughout the summer and
fall.

My big project currently is a book on network culture. This is a theoretical reflection on our own
time as an era distinct from postmodernism. I mean, surely we can’t operate with the idea that, a
generation after it first came together, postmodernism is still a current theoretical model. The role
of technology in everyday life is completely different, for example. It’s become a new dominant, a
kind of horizon for our culture that it most emphatically was not back in those days. Meanwhile,
financialization has risen to new heights and manufacturing has all but expired in the developed
world. I’ve published stretches of the book already and am aiming to have a draft on my Web site
by the end of the year. It’s a huge undertaking—and a shifting one—but it’s crucial to leaving
behind the notion that analysis has nothing to teach us anymore. Instead of bemoaning our
economic condition, let’s celebrate the fact that the unreflective scramble for shoddy work is over.

Let’s start thinking again.

mammoth: It seems to us that The Infrastructural City essentially does two things. First, it is aimed
at a better understanding of the infrastructural city. We might call this mapping (in a more
generalized sense that the mere production of graphical representations of urban conditions), you
refer to “redefin[ing] how we understand” cities. That task clearly constitutes the bulk of the text.
Second, it is also, at least occasionally, concerned with the question of how urbanists can operate
— can pursue desirable change — in the infrastructural city. As it develops an understanding of the
infrastructural city, it shows why the traditional tools of the urbanist (first and foremost, the plan)
have become increasingly ineffectual, and argues that we need, in response, to develop new tools.
Later, we’d like to return to this second concern, to suggestions about what might replace those
traditional tools, because we think The Infrastructural City contains some valuable hints about
those tools — such as your discussion of a “command line” architecture in “Invisible City”, or Roger
Sherman’s argument for an architecture that interacts directly with property, risk, and the informal
transactions that produce the form of the city. First, though, a question that relates to the task of
understanding the infrastructural city, as well as the “different conditions” you allude to.

In the two years since the publication of The Infrastructural City, we’ve seen several major social
and political events that are affecting the city and its infrastructures. First and foremost amongst
these is the global economic decline. Prognostications for the future of that decline vary wildly, but
it is indisputable that the bubble conditions in which the latest layer of growth in the infrastructural
city was laid down — the cell networks, the vast ex-urban speculations, the “return-to-the-city”
condominiums — have ended, and been replaced by economic uncertainty. (Though we doubt
anyone would accuse you of having failed to anticipate this decline, it is one thing to anticipate it,
and perhaps another to watch it play out.) One might also add to this the major political swing that
you’ve just noted, from Bush to Obama, which corresponded to a fairly broad hope (amongst
urbanists, at least) that infrastructure would have its day in the sun of federal funding, and the
disillusionment that has followed as what infrastructural funding has been forthcoming has been
largely concentrated on (admittedly needed) road repairs and (unnecessary) rural highway
expansions, both prized for their ‘shovel-ready’ quality. Meanwhile, technological changes — and
corresponding societal shifts in the use of technology — have continued. As Lane Barden
anticipates in the text, the Nokia phone featured on an ad cascading down the side of an office
tower in one of his photographs now looks virtually antiquarian, so distant is it in form and function
from the smart phones which increasingly dominate the cellular market. And their adoption is not
strictly limited to the wealthier technophiles one might expect. The Census Bureau, for instance,
recently found that one of the most effective ways to reach impoverished Hispanic neighborhoods
in Los Angeles is through downloadable apps and content.

Given these events, it seems quite possible to us that your reading of the infrastructural city has
shifted in those two years. Is that true? How might you map the infrastructural city differently
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today? One way to think about this might be: is there a chapter that you would include in a 2011
edition of The Infrastructural City that you didn’t include in 2008?

Varnelis: I’ve thought a lot about what the new chapter would be. I think that the book holds out a
bit more hope than the current situation really warrants and I needed to be more precise about the
problems we face.

So many people today hold out this idea that technology is our horizon: anything that goes wrong,
it seems, technology can fix. Design, in this sense, is technology’s right-hand. All of the pseudo-
academics and critics who praised the “creative city” and the Bilbao-effect suggest that design can
get us past any problems. Is your city a post-apocalyptic rust belt? Well, some clever design, say
via a Muji Store and a couple of design museums, will solve the problems. Or heck, embrace the
favela chic and just re-brand it as the Rome of the Rust Belt.

A new chapter would analyze how we got where we are and the impossibility of achieving the kind
of change that we need through design. Specifically, this chapter would be on how the problems of
complexity, over-accumulation, and diminishing returns in our society block the older idea of
infrastructure as a form of commons.

There’s little question that over-accumulation produced both the boom and the crash (just why this
is a mystery to so many economists is beyond me). We’ve seen, to put it in the simple terms that
This American Life used, the growth of a giant pool of money that business has accumulated since
the start of capitalism. It took centuries for the well-off and even relatively well-off to accumulate
$35 trillion of investment money worldwide, but in the six years between 2000 and 2006 that giant
pool of money doubled. All of these investors with all of this money wanted high returns; they
looked at the performance of market indices like the Dow and saw unprecedented rates of profit (in
the case of the Dow from 891 in 1980 to over 11,000 in 2000), considerably more than the
historical rate of return from manufacturing (which historically speaking has been roughly 8%).
After all, many of them had accumulated their money that way so why not expect the good times to
continue? And of course rates of taxation that also were historically low helped all of this. The
theory went that as long as tax rates were low, the economy would boom and the resulting growth
would generate even more revenues than if taxes were at a higher, sustainable level. This was a
great idea except that it was a little akin to taking speed to get you through a project: surely if it
improves your stamina tenfold, it’s got to be good for you, right? Well, eventually your teeth will fall
out, but if you keep at it you can always get out, right? Collectively, investors in the developed
countries ceased investing in production and instead turned more and more to complex financial
instruments that could produce high rates of return, even if these were based on bubble
economics. Manufacturing’s been gutted in places like the US or the UK. In our case, in 1980
manufacturing was about 25% of the GDP while financial services were about 12%. By the end of
the bubble in 2006, manufacturing was down to 12% while finance had soared to over 20%. I hate
to say that things have gotten worse since, but they have.

Again as far as “solutions” go, the case of China is a special one: capitalists are investing in an
area with tremendous inequalities and inefficiencies and able to reap huge rewards from low
wages and massive productivity gains. That’s how you can make good money on a $40 DVD
player that cost a dollar or two to produce. But that won’t last forever.

And then there’s housing. Architects were eager to participate in that boom and it was quite
stomach-turning to see them plunge headlong into a mad system. And housing did well, for a time,
returning the necessary rates of investment, but again, it was based on something from nothing.
Even now, in so many places—including the countries that I know well, the US, UK, Lithuania and
Ireland—the bubble still has some 20 to 40% to fall to return to reasonable rates based on long-
established historical relationships of what kind of real estate wages can support. Architecture
became virtual in the last decade, but it did so in “luxury” housing, not in cyberspace. Moreover,
just how economies that have no more real industrial base are supposed to produce the wages to
pay for this inflated real estate is beyond me.

I mentioned it in my introduction to the book, but now I’d be more emphatic about the role of
neoliberal economy policy in all this. Low taxes means little investment in infrastructure. Railroads
are literally falling apart. Gutted by underinvestment, average train speeds have been declining for
years. Refineries and the electric grid are stressed to a breaking point as deregulated industry
avoids tying up capital in rapidly-depreciating physical things whenever possible. So it’s no
surprise that, when Obama picked Larry Summers to come up with an economic policy for him, the
former Harvard President who once said that women weren’t smart enough to be scientists or
engineers chose bailing out financial services and handing out stimulus checks to consumers
instead of investing in infrastructure.

That’s the reality we’re up against and the Zaha Hadid-designed windmills that critics are upset
with me for not going ga-ga over are little more than Potemkin Villages masking a world continually
collapsing.

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The economy is infrastructure. I should have been more clear about that.

I also think it would have been helpful to talk about complexity in the way that Joseph Tainter
discusses it, yoking it to the framework that I’ve developed above. We’ve become so incredibly
adept at routing around our problems that a topological map of our world—if it were possible—
would be something like a map of the infrastructure in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. So to keep this
increasingly convoluted and highly bureaucratized system going, we have produced intense levels
of complexity that require greater and greater amounts of energy to keep going. This energy is
quite literal and we’re seeing diminishing marginal returns on energy invested even as peak oil
looms (and of course oil is our major source of energy). At a certain point, the system becomes
unsustainable and the result is collapse, which Tainter defines as a greatly diminished level of
complexity. Tainter suggests that the way out is innovation, by which he means technological
innovation although I think that the financial innovations that I described earlier are similar. The
problem is that these systems are unsustainable in a fundamental deep way. The Infrastructural
City isn’t just a condition, it’s a bellwether for a long-term culture of crisis.

In that light, although I’m tremendously sympathetic to projects like Roger Sherman’s game theory
urbanism as a way of operating within such highly complex environments, the lack of a larger
approach within the book suggests the lack of a larger solution within design per se. Rick Miller
and Ted Kane’s piece is brilliant in its unpacking of the problems that “light,” privatized
infrastructure produce in cities. It’s not so much a question of AT&T not extending its coverage
enough, it’s a question of how mobile phone companies lead cities to conceive of themselves as
entrepreneurs. That’s not an appropriate role for cities: what happened to ideas of the Commons?
That’s a failure point for the imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today. Other pieces
are like Calvino stories, unmasking the unsustainability that underlies the infrastructural city: a
town that excavates itself turning into a series of giant holes, a river that will disappear if its
restored to its natural state, the re-watering of a desert lake, and so on. The book’s value in my
mind—and what I am trying to do through my current writing—is to make people go out and
uncover the deep madness underlying our society. People talk about the irrelevance of academics.
Maybe that’s because we got too busy talking about obscure theory and weren’t willing to focus on
the deeper issues that, frankly, it was our duty to take on.

mammoth: How peculiarly American are these problems? While financial upheaval is clearly a
globalized and interconnected phenomenon, one gets the impression that, as a political and
cultural matter, the “idea of the Commons” remains relatively healthy in, say, continental western
Europe. And that perhaps corresponding advantages accrue to design culture: there is a greater
quantity (and quality) of public work to be done, critical infrastructures are more likely to be
designed by public teams which include architects and landscape architects (rather than by private
corporations). There, the odd, ad-hoc semi-publics that control American local, urban politics —
NIMBYist neighborhood associations, our individualist distrust of the very idea of expertise, etc. —
do not appear to have such a stranglehold on planning processes. Or, for that matter, even with all
the governmental dysfunction and systemic poverty, the situation seems less deadlocked in South
America, where young designers are thriving, backed by governments, institutions, and individual
leaders who are arguing for the importance of a commons, and, critically, backing that argument up
with targeted spending. We’re thinking, for instance, of the celebrated case of Medellin, where
architecture has been treated as social and economic infrastructure.

Varnelis: These problems aren’t just American. We’re dealing with global problems endemic to an
aging capitalism. The idea of the commons is certainly more popular on the continent, but if you
listen to the response to the economic crisis there, it’s that this is the end of the European welfare
state. In other words, the crisis will make Europe is going to be more like the US/UK/Ireland, not
less. I hate to say anything bad about the unions in a country where unions are all but dead, but
unions were part of the problem in the US and are a bigger part of the problem in Europe. Rather
than working to build a more just system across the board, unions have instead turned to
protecting entrenched membership. This is a major problem in America, whether it be the collapse
of NASA or the collapse of cities and its increasingly the problem in Europe too. Watch for a
European PATCO crisis soon. Don’t expect much building anytime soon, unless it’s done with
funny money.

Now when we look at Medellin, certainly there’s a lot to applaud. But you’re also looking at a
condition where capital has moved to a place that has been underproductive for too long. There’s
no question that it’s easier to do more in places that are growing.

mammoth: You mention that the loss of the “idea of the Commons [is] a failure point for the
imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today.” But here in America, has there ever been
a strong culture of the idea of the Commons guiding the development of infrastructure? Certainly,
there have been select examples — Eisenhower’s freeways — but many of the infrastructures that
have been most influential in the development of our cities, such as Los Angeles’ own streetcar
networks and New York City’s subway, were privately funded and planned. Should architects be
working to reclaim (or construct) the idea of the commons? Or do we — architects, landscape

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architects, designers, urbanists, who all presumably hold out some hope of remaining relevant to
the future of the American city — need to find ways, like Sherman’s approach, to design around
the absence of the commons? Or perhaps this pair of questions sets up a false dichotomy, and the
way to continue working while not ignoring the “deeper issues” is to hold seemingly Sisyphean
tasks like reclaiming the idea of the commons in tension with flexible and approaches which are
aimed at small, tactical acts of productive architecture?

Varnelis: Let’s be careful about one thing: neoliberalism—coupled with Ameriphobia overseas—
has been highly effective at depicting this idea of the US as having always been the same. There’s
been a radical rewriting of history to make it seem like the frontier myth is all there is. There’s
always been a back and forth and many of those infrastructures were turned public rather rapidly
only to see much greater success. Often, of course this has been in service of real estate, as the
case of the LADWP shows too clearly.

As far as design: I agree with you. Architects have been too enthralled by neoliberalism for too
long, e.g. public/private partnerships (don’t even get me started: bad loans for bad private projects
are a major source of fiscal crisis in cities today), the market, etc. We need to advocated for policy
change, toward greater shared resources. I think it’s obvious to anyone that the current political
and economic system is massively dysfunctional and will come to an end. Just when, none of us
know. Will it be replaced by a happy form of fascism? Just possibly. Architects need to advocate
for positive political change, but as they do so, they’re going to need to find a way to make do and,
in general, it is going to be tactics like Roger’s that are going to make a difference on an individual
level.

mammoth: A consistent argument mammoth makes is that the value of architecture and architects
lies in much more than just the design of buildings. Which is not at all to say that we find buildings
uninteresting or unimportant, but rather that architecture as a discipline ought to think of itself more
as a way of thinking than as a discipline that — like, say, structural engineering — is primarily
concerned with developing a unique kind of technical expertise and defending that ‘turf’ from the
encroachment of other disciplines.

You make a similar comment in a recent interview published in Triple Canopy, saying that
“architecture doesn’t teach you how to regurgitate knowledge, rather it teaches you how to deal
with problems. Architecture has always been about much more than just building buildings”.

This is a particularly relevant position, we think, in a climate where “building buildings” is, as you
note, something we should expect to see relatively much less of. (Kenneth Frampton, writing in
Steven Holl’s new monograph Urbanisms, notes that Holl literally had to go to China to find the
regulatory and financial freedom to build the sort of “megaforms” that he had been drawing. Setting
aside whether those buildings are necessary or not, it seems an instructive lesson in the difficulty
of realizing what might traditionally be considered ‘significant’ architecture.)

Do you think, though, that architecture schools are really producing architects who are prepared to
be thinkers rather than technicians?

Varnelis: Absolutely. The longstanding recession that started in the early 1970s and lasted until
the mid-1990s led many architects to investigate radically different methods of production.
Unfortunately, the building boom led the field astray, back into a disciplinarity of the most
conservative kind just at the same time as it egged them on to build pretty much the worst
buildings since the mid-nineteenth century. It was a colossal failure of a decade, a model of
everything we shouldn’t have done. “Make it new!” So few of us were asking why, why should we
make it new? Even fewer were asking why make it at all. Education, which could have paved the
way for a new century of architecture, has been devastated. Most schools have either retrenched
into a nostalgia for the hand or a fetish for parametric fantasies. Doesn’t anybody think about how
these people will be employed?

But this is the reason that I’m at Columbia. Dean Wigley set out to create what he calls the
“expanded architect,” building a school in which you get an architectural education, but you also
employ the methods you learn in nontraditional venues. It’s a big enough school to easily
accommodate such efforts. The sort of work that the Spatial Information Design Lab, or C-Lab, or
the Netlab is doing is, generally speaking, unlike what’s produced in architecture schools or in the
typical office, but it’s essential for pushing the boundaries in the field. I’m optimistic that other
schools will follow our lead to do the same in the future. Imagine what sort of students you might
produce if a school decided it wasn’t necessary to deal with the accreditors anymore. People have
been asking why teach history and theory. Well, why teach structures or professional practice?
Maybe not everyone needs these classes. I think it’s a radical experiment that’s well worth
pushing.

This entry was written by mammoth, posted on September 13, 2010 at 4:43 pm, filed under architecture,
economics, infrastructure, interviews, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field, urbanism and tagged kazys-
varnelis, reading-the-infrastructural-city. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS
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6 Responses to “architects without architecture”

1. Cluster | City - Design - Innovation » “The Economy is Infastructure”

Septembersays:
14, 2010 at 10:16 am

[…] Read full story here […]

2. Architects Without Architecture | varnelis.net says: September 14, 2010 at 9:35 pm

[…] here. Submitted by admin on 14 September, 2010 – […]

3. Shepherds, Scouts and Experimentation « dpr-barcelona says: October 9, 2010 at 2:28 am

[…] in a recent interview, architectural historian Kazys Varnelis provided his two year post-
publication comments regarding […]

4. Review notes on Garrett Jones text on organizational theory, sixth edition « kansas
reflections says: October 12, 2010 at 10:54 pm

[…] architects without architecture (m.ammoth.us) […]

5. predictive gis and geospatial decisions – mammoth // building nothing out of something
says: May 3, 2011 at 9:36 am

[…] like “spatial intelligence” which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is
understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of
techniques, and also believing that the capacity […]

6. bedrijfsongeval says: July 18, 2011 at 7:08 pm

You need to take part in a contest for among the best blogs on the web. I will advocate
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